Election Reflection

My idealism about the electoral process got pushed and pulled out of me a year ago. I did indeed vote today and that vote was cast for Obama. My vote was cast with confidence and yes, "hope for change." Only time will tell if these emotions prove warranted or not.

The sad thing is that in the event of being let down after 4 or 8 years of an Obama presidency, it may be difficult to figure out if it was Obama who failed me or the circumstances that Obama was thrown into.

One thing is undeniably exciting. The American people seem to care again. Actually caring can be the strongest power we have to prevent the abuse of power. Leaders can get away with a whole lot if the people they are leading don't pay attention to what they are doing. I fear that a potentially ineffective Obama presidency may once again lend itself to a detached populous. It could, on the other hand, get people to pay attention even more. Let's hope. (Obama will almost certainly make government more transparent than McCain.)

Will an Obama presidency further stifle the possibility of third party politics? Our two party system leaves millions of Americans and their issues entirely unrepresented. Will the radical left lose whatever momentum they have because "the most liberal Senator" is the president? Historically, radical left politics gets subsumed by progressive Democrats in crisis times, only later to be ignored once elections are won. And when the issues of the radical left are addressed, its often through ineffective agencies or poorly enforced statutes. If the democratic candidate was not as liberal as Obama, you probably wouldn't have seen Nader fall off a cliff like he did during the campaign process.

What will become of the Republican party? Many are predicting that they will be forced to reinvent themselves. I am concerned that this may not happen very soon. Krugman writes

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place. (Full Article--The Republican Rump)

Will Obama actually make government cool again? I think he has the capacity to promote local-level political organization. Is it possible that we might see the development of political branches rise up across the country which bring people together to talk about societal issues in the same way people get up on Sunday mornings to talk about spiritual issues?

My last concern then is this: Will an Obama presidency unify the country and loosen up the polarization of both politics and personal postures toward cooperation and change? I fear that instead we may see people ever more caught up in their ideologies, making them incapable of pragmatically tackling the very real problems we are all having to confront. I hope I am wrong, but the voices of the voters for each candidate seem pretty radical (love/hate). Extreme passion on either side promotes disgust for difference which crushes the spirit of cooperation.

Obama however, as an individual separate from his followers, does seem very capable of transcending polarization and radical ideologies. That is what I believe allowed him to get this far in the first place. He did it as president of the Harvard Law Review, lets hope he can do it as president of the United States.